My sister turned to me and says, "You ask the stupidest questions!"
I was devastated. Only recently have I realized the truth. My sister's just not that bright. (To be fair, she's humanities/arts. Her strengths are in other areas.)
She was probably just thinking "jeez, who cares how manatees float".
As a Ph.D. student, what was more daunting than the realization of just how much I didn't know, was the day I realized that I had more questions than I could find answers to in one lifetime...makes you feel rather...mortal.
Master's Degree: you realize you don't know anything
Doctorate: you realize nobody knows anything
MS = More of the Same
PhD = Piled Higher and Deeper
Quoting Prof. Carlos Bustamante (Cornell):
"Being a scientist means living on the borderline between your competence and your incompetence. If you always feel competent, you aren’t doing your job."
"When you start on a new problem, you always feel stupid. You might spend a whole day on a single paper, an hour on a single line. And you still don’t understand it. When you get to a certain position in life, you don’t want to feel stupid anymore. In mathematics, that’s when you’re dead."
As a CS guy suddenly having to do statistics (which my crypto prof called "Sadistics") 10 years after my last calc class, I completely agree that you often feel stupid.
OTOH, once you've felt stupid & worked through it in a few areas, the rest of science suddenly feels more accessible to you. You know that you can pick up a textbook on the topic and muddle through until you know what you need.
My dad had to learn a good amount about electronics to build his physics experiments. To this day he's better at it than I am.
I was in school when I first read that line. I showed it to a fairly well-known scientist who immediately put a copy on his office door. The smartest people I have met are also the quickest to admit they don't know.
1. BS: This is the time when students read pre-digested information. 2. MS: They continue to read pre-digested information. In addition, they also start reading information directly from the source (papers). Also, get a brief taste of what it means to contribute to the field of knowledge 3. PhD: Students should read solely from the source (only papers). Further, it is payback time. After having benefitted from all the knowledge that others created, they are now required to produce knowledge.
The reason it takes research 5-7 years has nothing to do with how long it takes to answer the thesis statement. Instead it has to do with how long it takes for a student to become “mature in research”. In other words for them to understand that their job is: • Identify problems, solutions to which are relevant and challenging (the solutions can serve a purpose or can simply possess aesthetic appeal). • Create solutions and document them for everyone else to benefit from (papers and more papers) • Mentor young students to embrace research • Teach digested information with a hint of the appeal of science and research
Confronting a significant problem (not an incremental addition) is daunting, I would not say it makes a student look stupid. I would say it shows the opportunity and need that a field exhibits.
